Next

[Dr.Volt]

WARNING:  Mild Spoilers

My wife and I watched the movie Next (that stars Nicholas Cage, Julianne Moore etc.) Sunday night.  Good movie.  Okay plot.  But I have really been fascinated with the guys the main character's powers.  Though it isn't a superhero genre' movie at all...I thought it was a fascinating and potentially potent power.

In case you want to see the movie and haven't, I'll try not to spoil it for you.  Cage's character can see 2 minutes into the future and only those events that involve him.  But this gift also allows him to see an amazing variety of possible events and outcomes.  What this allows him to do is avoid and take advantage of things that he knows will be coming.  For example, he can see himself getting shot, walk into an explosive device, or that some one will throw a punch at him.  He can essentially just get out of the way of such attacks or avoid them altogether.  In this sense, it is a very defensive power. 

I wonder though how you might build a character like this?  I think a meta-human who had these powers and maybe some high level martial arts/acrobatics training could be quite formidable.  What attributes and powers would best reflect this ability?  For example, he effectively evades a slew of casino security in the beginning by seeing where they would be at various times (even though they had him on camera the whole time!).  This could effectively be a kind of invisibility or teleport.

Did you see this movie?  Any thoughts? 

[stumpy]

As much panning as the movie got, I enjoyed it, too.

Bringing that to the game is a little tough to do well. I think that the simplest replication of that sort of ability would be to give the character a really high agility + DANGER SENSE + NIMBLE, a cloaking power, and maybe several hero points. A really fast limey lure swapped to a wall object to simulate being able to dodge behind stuff to avoid beams might be helpful, too.

If you wanted to do some scripting, I don't think it would be impossible to record the states and positions of characters, say every ten seconds for the last two minutes and have the game "reset" things to one of those previous times by teleporting/respawning characters to where they were and their state at the time. Of course, that wouldn't fix things like destroyed buildings, objectives being failed, and so on. If the game gave us scripting access to saved games, then this could be done somewhat thoroughly and smoothly, but it does not.

[Epimethee]

To toot my own horn, Precognitive would be appropriate, moreso if using the character in a mod which generate special events for Precog or Enhanced Senses (cf. manual).

If you wanted to do some scripting, I don't think it would be impossible to record the states and positions of characters, say every ten seconds for the last two minutes and have the game "reset" things to one of those previous times by teleporting/respawning characters to where they were and their state at the time.

I really need to update Time Master for FFX 3, don't I?

[Blitzgott]

Another way of simulating such power'd be giving danger sense plus enhanced senses/precognitive and a pass through passive defense that frequently+ protects the user from everything (all forms of attack and all damage types). It's a good alternative if you don't mind extremely expensive characters.

Another, (much) less expensive way of simulating this power would be giving the character enhanced senses or precognitive and a pass through active defense against all forms of attack and damage types. It's not as good as the former, but it works rather well, I think, and I remember that in the movie there were some instances in which Johnson had to consciously activate his power, which may mean that it's not something reflexive.

[AfghanAnt]

coordinator would be a great one.